Dear Mom and Dad,
This isn’t Khabarovsk anymore. Though, like the Khabarovsks and Vladivostoks that came before, Chita is the capital of a kraj – in this case, the Zabajkalsky kraj, or the Beyond Baikal Kraj. All the same, this ain’t no place for a city boy. Devoid of any real signs of modernity save a high rise apartment building or two on the city’s northern perimeter, the city is very much two to three story structures of old that, during the dry summer months, give the city a kind of western dust bowl look in an Eastern Siberian reality. You’ll just as soon come upon a supermarket as a wooden house – the latter of which are everywhere strewn throughout the city.
The dustiness really is the overwhelming characteristic at the moment, however. It doesn’t seem like it has rained in a long time, as the city is coated in a brownish haze. Alas, that’s not just thirsty earth blowing about – the city’s location in a extended depression amongst rolling hills has made it a swill-bowl of air pollution, frequently ranking among Russia’s worst for the lungs (and I was looking forward to maybe arriving on a day of the famous “black sky regime” in Krasnoyarsk…).
Unlike Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, which both feature well developed waterfront areas, all that I have seen of the Chita River is quite literally fenced off from the rest of the city. With little natural beauty in this barren land, it begs the question why they have not exploited one of the few natural resources around. This is not a question for such a letter though.
The city has two main points of reference: the inevitable Lenin Square – an impressively large and empty waste of space leftover from Soviet parades and overhung with an obnoxiously long Lenin invariably either 1) pointing into the future 2) throwing back his tail coats 3) standing jauntily, arms akimbo, hips a-bobbin… - and the indubitable Orthodox Church, shining gaudily in the dust and mire of its surroundings, but always so very devilishly photogenic. In Chita it is right across from the railroad station.
While these facts are very well and good as a wholly objective overview, perhaps a more impressionistic portrait might better serve your reading pleasure more, mother, father. I would say Chita feels like what it looks like on the map. When one of my friends asked me how Tatarstan was, I had not even realized I was in Tatarstan. I, of course, am not, but my ready acceptance of the fact says something in and of itself…
After spending yesterday roaming the city on foot, there’s one more place I had yet to get to – the yet more inevitable still WWII memorial park, or “victory park” as it is without fail called. It, however, was mostly a goat ranch. There was a certain piece in the deserted silence, but the overgrown, peopleless paths on a sunny Saturday afternoon are what I’ll remember.
Luckily I glanced again at the map of the city before packing my bags and noticed a little chapel on a hill with an overlook of the city not far from my hostel. The thirty minute ascent through a neighborhood of wooden houses devoid of indoor plumbing led me up to the overlook. It was easily the best thing I experienced in Chita and once again filled me with a desire to move on to the next city.
So I take the train tonight to Ulan Ude, which, I know you know, is the capital of the Republic of Buryatia, a subject of the Russian Federation. Recently Buryatia has been in the news, because a shaman from Yakutia (another easy to overlook Republic in Russia, only the size of India) walking to Moscow to banish Putin, was arrested there, which sparked more protests to accompany the many mass political protests that have been occurring country-wide since 2017, but which have really picked up in the last several months.
Love you,
Alex
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